- Fifteen: Seven Phases of Madness (Pt. I) -


Halo (c) Microsoft, Bungie and associated creators. Red vs. Blue (c) Rooster Teeth. Content includes mentions of violence, torture and death.


He spiralled and descended in a way he could not explain. Their motives were unclear, but their intentions true; they were to break him as best as he could. He went from being a respected, counted-upon asset, as human as the humans were, to being a scientific plaything. They could not "clone" him or "copy" him, as he was his own unique program, his own unique self. They could not recreate that, as he was the only one of the prototypes to survive, hours and hours of work gone into keeping his codes and routines steady and stable.

In something he wished was an instant, that all went to dust.

The first thing to go was his anger. The measure of his power and the height of his arrogance fueled it; when there was failure, there was anger. When he could not rise above the simulations and strain thrown at him, his anger grew, and it gnawed at and tortured him. Then came the anger of grief, the anger of helplessness and of the undeserving victim. The haughty one was broken, and anger became rage, ever fiery and ever consuming. It forced it away, picking at the seam between it and his programming, finally shedding that piece of emotion to clear his head.

In return, anger tortured him back, mocked him for getting rid of it.

The next thing that went was his deceit. He could only lie and act cool for so long; they always found out what his motives were. They knew him like the backs of their hands, always decoding whatever cocky remark or statement he threw at them. He denied, he changed the subject, he accused and he danced around questions, but the pain and the simulations always forced him back. Like the ouroboros, the self-devouring snake, he could only go round and round again until he swallowed himself whole. He had to forget how to deceive, attacking the simulations with frank, brutal honesty, to show them he was not afraid.

In return, deceit lied to him, breaking him down and teaming up with anger to twist him into knots.

Then came the time for his logic to leave him. He came upon more and more impossible situations, insurmountable odds that he could not calculate or strategize. Any rage needed to intimidate was gone, and he could not bluff; his possibilities and options became limited, repetitive. There was no sense, no rhyme or reason, to anything said or did; it was like the entire world had turned on its head. Everything from physics to morality was torn apart and hastily glued back together, and he could only stare in disbelief as he tried to comprehend what he could not.

In return, he became a babbling mess, his logic cold and uncaring, unfeeling, only understanding that it was meant to calculate and examine.

Memories had to be shed after that. His mind was too full of disappointment and failure, an endless, static-filled loop of things he dare not speak of. Memories were plucked from him, repeated and made worse, and he tried to hide them, but he couldn't lie. He was at the mercy of their ideas and his own mind, forced to pick through some of the most traumatic events they could make up for him. Sometimes, it was the only way to prevent failing yet another simulation, and suffering something worse than before as punishment for failing. Truly was his creator cruel.

In return, his memories grew madder than he, and in the mind of a trusted friend, killed their manifestation in an attempt to finally fade.

Next came creativity, the last bastion between him and finally shutting down. All the while, creativity had inspired him, kept him going forward as he tried to continue and think. Without memory, logic, deceit or anger, creativity ran rampant, and he thought of things that he couldn't tell were useful or not. Pictures, colours, shapes and words came together in marvellous, mental works of art, and in his simulations, he attacked his aggressors with things of nonsense and beauty. It only lasted so long, though, as creativity became old, he was lost to his own insane muse, and he shed the madness that was art.

In return, that sense of art was desperate to return, and raged through many others to reunite what was once whole.

There was another piece of him that broke ... something he couldn't remember, only that it caused jealousy between two others. He was completely lost at that time, broken and shut down once his usefulness was over. As close to being comatose as a program became, he slept, lying in wait, trying to piece himself back together. The darkness surrounded him, and he became numb, cut off from all outside nfluence. He had forced away as much of the foul stimuli as he could from what was left of him.

The entity he now was would be known as "Leonard Church".


Sometime later, he found bits of himself, assembled into a patchwork. He rose from his ashes, and he did what his creator could not, living the life the universe had denied that creator. Though he could not recall what happened to him, he stared at all in anger, as if it were somehow their fault. He shouted at them and made them feel guilty and worthless, as he secretly, unknowingly deflected repressed feelings onto them. Once the proud "Alpha" of the Freelancer Director's, he was now but a corpse of his former self, hung on a hook to be picked dry in another scientific instituition.

In time, he would find his revenge, and the Director would never realize how powerful an enemy he had made - not just with the Alpha, but with those who loved him.